Social capital has been recently held up as a conceptual framework to build a bridge between the diverse disciplines involved in rural development. However, despite its potential and the impressively rapid take-up of the concept by the community of development professionals, it remains an...

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Preface; Gertrud Buchenrieder and Tom Dufhues. Issues and evidence of social networks in boosting rural households' welfare; Gertrud Buchenrieder. Open issues and implications for measuring individual social capital in developing countries; Tom Dufhues and Gertrud Buchenrieder. What...

One of the most important issues in rural development is empowerment and entitlement of farmers through participation. Decentralisation and participation are seemingly interdependent. Therefore, the paper begins with a theoretical discussion on the cause and effects of this interdependence....

How do cultural practices influence the process of participatory governance within local administrative structures? We address this question by reflecting cultural dimensions, such as collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance within a contextual sensitive "cultural sensemaking"...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...